Students Boo Commencement Speaker After She Calls AI Next Industrial Revolution

Social media isn’t always about consuming content. It’s also about getting jolts of momentary joy and reward. You get those in two ways: seeing cool things, and participating in cool things. Especially cool things before they go viral. Clicking like on a post that isn’t viral yet, and gambling to yourself whether it will go viral, has the same dopamine flux when it pays off as winning at the slots. Even my reward-defective brain manages to eke out a moment of reward from that. So if you simply remove the content, what’s left is the gambling market. Gambling on something you upvote going viral isn’t about how much content there is in what you placed your bets on, it’s about being able to have that special knowing look when someone tells you about it because you’ve just won the socio-memetic lottery. And AI isn’t doing anything whatsoever to stop that reward loop.

I proposed once a while back that we should have the HN admins strip all integer counts for a week server-side, to see if the site quality improved or worsened during that time. The mods suggested I ask HN, so I did. HN loathed the idea of it, for every possible reason except this one: removing all those integers would be like quitting gambling cold turkey after years of pulling the vote lever every day. I’m not much less vulnerable to this than everyone else, but I still want to see it happen someday. I remain reasonably confident that our social media site’s quality would skyrocket after a couple days of our posts and comments being disinfected of make-integer-go-up jackpots.

The content being untrustworthy doesn't matter when it comes to social media, as most of what is enticing about social media nowadays isn't the content of the content. It's the fact that there is a never-ending stream of content specifically catered to maximize your dopamine to keep you scrolling.

So much of social media nowadays is just low quality clips of TV shows/movies with an AI-generated song over them. Or the same Minecraft parkour map as an AI voice recites an r/AmITheAsshole post. Or AI-generated funny videos. The quality of the content doesn't matter at all.

Anyone I've talked to about how it was all just AI just responds with something akin to "I don't care if it's AI, it's funny! Let people enjoy things!"

Twitter arguably did that a while ago.

I have this hope too but social media is junk food now, and junk food is a very lucrative product. People don't seem to care as long as it's engaging.

If that happens, AI will have been worth the hassle.

That describes social media for the last 10 years, at least. Not dead yet.

In writing code, yes. But has there been an actual positive impact in other fields?

Isn't it bad now that Sam Altman and the others are backpedaling on this and going "jobs are going to still exist you just can't imagine them!" because the PR problem was getting so big? [1]

Like don't we want people running these companies to be honest to the public rather than misdirection?

[1]. https://www.platformer.news/sam-altman-ai-backlash/

It's much more than that, it will solve the deepest mysteries of the universe, not now, but in a decade, very likely.

> But how much would you like to bet that 90% of those students who were booing also used AI to do their homework for them quite often? So your take away would be "the AI stole their education". No, they were dishonest and the AI helped them cheat themselves out of learning.

This is like saying a smoker can't criticize the tobacco industry. It's entirely possible to recognize that AI in school is a huge problem while (hypothetically, in this case) still using it. Indeed, if enough of your peers are using it and you do not, you are effectively being punished for being virtuous. It's a lot like being the one cyclist in the Tour de France who isn't doping.

Similarly, if your peers aren't able to keep a conversation going in a seminar because they had AI do their reading and assignments for them, then you, as a student, are having your education stolen from you in a very real way. Education is something that happens in community. When enough of your community is using AI, your education will suffer.

> the mistake is the framing that "the revolution" or "the next big thing" is always a good thing?

They are good things. If you were an adult, male aristocrat, yes, your untouched meadows and streams got tainted. If you were a woman you stopped dying in childbirth. If you think of infants as people, they stopped massively dying.

The Industrial Revolution was good. But it also required erecting the modern administrative state to manage. People had to soberly measure the problems, weigh the benefits and risks, and then invent new institutions and ways of thinking to accommodate the new world.

The public can't see any trains, electricity, concrete or glass windows, they see employment going away as workers and zero benefit as consumers.

Maybe AI enables great inventions in a decade, but for now the only appeal is that multinational corporations get to fire workers and everything's filled with slop. Of course they're not happy.

Many things will change, because many things are currently useless in the world right now, literally most jobs in a way shouldn't even exist. You think a guy behind the mcdo counter should exist? It shouldn't, that just an engineering "mistake" as it can already be solved, the world is just slow to catch-up, but it's not only AI, that's just automation. We banked for decades on jobs that virtually shouldn't exist except for the sole purpose of creating jobs, it's like a giant ponzi scheme literally and it will all catch-up at some point.

I think Society will completely reshape itself over the next decades, likely with UBI and other form of social help and the ones that don't want to partake into the whole "AI orchestration" will just not have any opportunity imo, sad, but this is the way I see it. I truly believe it because myself and ALL the people I know have pseudo-replaced their work with solely orchestrating AI, including very complex jobs and lately because some of my friends asked me, I've also built "agents" that replaced entirely their work, and their employer don't even know about it (customer management, remote) which proves that those jobs shouldn't even exist as they are ALREADY replaceable, all Zoom meetings are immediately recorded, agents do basic loop adversarial with all common models, then proceed with doing tasks and so-on, that last for about 30min and the whole week of work is done, all chats are directly sent to a triage agent as well then the whole rag thing and so on.

My work went from managing/developing 1 repo to 70 repo at once, evening to morning answering questions like a bot 10h a day with 8 monitors in front of my face, and I'm realistic, I know at some point I can literally replace my own self with an AI as well to answer for me, it's just a matter of time.

We need to rethink everything and the whole AI hate from the youth will not change anything about it.

I have multiple friends also running pretty large businesses with 30 or more staff, and right now they are literally at a point where they argue about why they shouldn't fire most of them, it's fuckin sad, but it's the reality.

Unemployment rampant. All production remains in the hands of a few. All power (tokens) remains in the hands of a few. Goods are cheaper but no one can buy them. Path to the upper class now guarded closely by tokens, potential avenues for entrepreneurs diminish rapidly. Own an AI or compute, get someone to give you tokens, or live in poverty.

Distribution of abundance in current time is close to evil, America reducing entitlements and support (not expanding). Rampant waste. No reason to think any of this will change.

> Cost of goods and services drops by orders of magnitude at every point in the supply chain.

That sounds great, but how are LLMs supposed to achieve this? You can't just say "AI will make a utopia". You have to present a vision for how it will get us there.

I'm tired of hearing about how AI will solve all the worlds problems. I want to see actual progress towards achieving these goals. And for the most part that hasn't manifested. Most people would consider AI to have had a net negative impact on their lives.

It's hard not to make that leap when so many layoffs are (according to PR releases anyway) attributed to AI adoption. Even if the reality on the ground is that many of these workforce reductions are to make the balance sheets look better (presumably as a bet on AI), it's impossible to ignore the accelerating wealth gap, especially in the context of the gutting of regulations and state actors leveraging world events on prediction markets. We will not be given a fair deal if we simply wait for our benefactors to provide one.

The number of people in absolute poverty has shrunk, but the proportion of national income held by the wealthy has increased, so economic mobility is declining. There are many reasons for this, but typically deployment of technology is a capital expense and employers aim to realize all the gains from their investment, notwithstanding the upskilling and/or deskilling effect it has on workers, who are treated as fungible economic units rather than people. Nobody likes this except capitalists.

Doom is popular right now. People want to feel terrible and pessimistic and their media diets only reinforce this.

Then it should easy to show a world where we are all not in abject poverty. We’re waiting.

Yes, but during those transformations, the CEOs of the companies selling the products involved weren't actively and aggressively marketing them as being able to replace all the humans they employ.

You can't have it both ways: either LLMs are an amazing, revolutionary technology that can replace many human jobs in unprecedented ways, or it's going to be a mild transition that really only helps people.

For someone taking about basic logic, you're making quite the leap in logic by assuming they used LLMs to do every single bit of schoolwork.

> You can't have it both ways.

Yes you can. They use AI and also despise it because it will turn the world into one big caste system. Ones with access to compute, and ones without.

I'm confused - you're suggesting that past suffering justifies present suffering?

I mean the Luddites were mad for a reason, and many may forget the industrial revolution was a rather bloody affair.

Avoiding a repeat of that would be great while also increasing productivity would be good.

No, that's why unions exist.

> their excellent education and optimism will overcome even the most ominous obstacles, technological or otherwise

Or, alternatively, that we need the humanities today in a fundamental, possibly existential, way. If AI is another Industrial Revolution, rise to be our Sinclairs, Dickens and Tolstoys.

> I'm only seeing this kind of anti-ai tendency only in American/Western art circles

Hmm, how would we measure and confirm this hypothesis?

anecdotally, I have noticed the same thing. The most affluent people are afraid of the moat being bridged methinks.

You have to admit though, a very appropriate speaker for new graduates in 2026.

Interesting, it’s not my experience in recent interactions with CS students. There was more positivity around possibilities.

However there was a feeling that “the job” is radically changing right now.